The University of Portsmouth has been part of an international collaboration into the effectiveness of drones for post-disaster search and rescue missions in Mozambique.
The experiment was run by the United Nation's World Food Programme and the UK Institute of Search and Technical Rescue, in conjunction with Mozambique's national disaster management agency (INGD).
The University of Portsmouth team, led by Professor Richard Teeuw, worked alongside teams from Mozambique, Canada, South Africa and Portugal, as well as a British International Search & Rescue (UK ISAR) team.
The experiment involved many types of drone – both fixed-wing and quadcopter - looking for targets on land and in water, with simultaneous flights over multiple sites. For a situational overview of the drone test area, the Portsmouth team provided imagery from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 radar satellite and the PlanetScope micro-satellite constellation, as well as elevation data from the Japanese-American PALSAR radar satellite.
The University's Global Earth Model (GEM) group provided expertise in coding and Big Data analytics, to produce a prototype app for faster interpretation of drone images, enabling more effective locating of people in need of post-disaster assistance.
This was one of the largest experiments ever conducted into the effectiveness of drones for wide-area searches.
